CS371p Spring 2021 Week 6: Yichen Zhang

What did you do this past week?

I stayed at a friend’s place during the winter storm and got back to my apartment last Saturday when the power was restored. Although it was fun hanging out with friends, I really missed my own apartment and I’ve never felt so grateful for having power and running water. I put meat and milk in the snow so I still got food when everything at HEB was out of stock. We got started on the Voting project after the lecture on Wednesday and implemented the simplest solution pretty quickly.

What’s in your way?

I’ve applied for master’s/PhD degree and I haven’t got an offer yet. I got rejected by UT PhD program, which was really upsetting. Most of the schools I applied to haven’t gotten back to me yet. As time goes by, I’m getting more and more concerned about where I will end up studying.

What will you do next week?

I hope I could finish the Voting project and projects for Data Mining and Autonomous Driving this weekend and spend most of the time preparing for the Career fair.

If you read it, what did you think of the Single Responsibility Principle?

SRP is really. beneficial for large-scale software projects. I have a natural tendency to combine responsibilities into one class for simplicity and clarity, but as a matter of fact, that will make an adverse impact. It’s definitely important to try to use SRP at all times.

What was your experience of Voting and consts? (this question will vary, week to week)

I’m trying to implement an optimized Voting algorithm. I do have the algorithm in mind but I need to get more familiar with using data structures in C++ and references/pointers. consts is really useful. I only used const for a threshold or min/max values. It’s really interesting to see what a pointer that is declared as a constant pointer or treats the int as read-only can do.

How did you fare in the storm?

As mentioned above, I went to a friend’s place that didn’t lose water and power and managed to survive the storm.

What made you happy this week?

I’m really grateful to have power in my apartment and there is really nothing else I’d ask for.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

robin_stocks library can be used to trade stocks on Robinhood. I’m still playing with it and hopefully with the help of it I don’t need to look at the stock market all the time.